ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge @thegyth @MichaelJBooks #BlogTour
It’s my turn on the blog tour for She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge today and I will be sharing my review with you. My thanks to Jenny Platt from Michael Joseph for the place on the tour and for providing an e-copy of the book for review purposes.
Six friends. One killer. Who do you trust?
On a hot July night in 1983, six school friends go camping in the forest. Bright and brilliant, they are destined for great things, and young Aurora Jackson is dazzled to be allowed to tag along.
Thirty years later, a body is discovered. DCI Sheens is called to the scene, but he already knows what’s waiting for him: Aurora Jackson, found at long last.
But that’s not all. The friends have all maintained their innocence, but the body is found in a hideaway only the six of them knew about.
It seems the killer has always lurked very close to home . . .
Or support your high street with Hive.
She Lies in Wait is a story of a cold case. After 30 years the body of missing 14 year old, Aurora Jackson, is finally unearthed right at the beginning of the book. We follow the hours before her disappearance in flashback chapters. She was camping with her older sister and her sister’s friends, drink and drugs were involved but Aurora was the odd one out as she didn’t do all that stuff.
So what happened to her? Well, that is what DCI Jonah Sheens and his team are tasked with finding out. The greater part of the story is the investigation which takes place over the course of two weeks. Within the group of friends there are people who have gone on to be quite powerful and Jonah is up against it in many ways.
I liked Jonah immensely. He’s an interesting character, although we didn’t really find out that much about him. Hidden depths and all that. He’s got a great team assisting him in the investigation too and I loved how they all had their particular strengths which made them incredibly strong as a team.
I found the cold case aspect of this book really caught my attention. It already puts the police on the back foot so the way the evidence is formulated and testimonies collected were particularly intriguing. It makes for a tense and exciting story.
I note from the back of the book that there will be a new Jonah Sheens book out next year. I’m not surprised as I feel there is a lot more to explore with him and with his team, particularly DC Hanson, whose personal life certainly seems a little complicated!
She Lies in Wait is a great crime/police procedural debut. It’s got a complex and skilful plot, one which certainly kept this reader guessing.
Gytha Lodge is a multi-award-winning playwright, novelist and writer for video games and screen. She is also a single parent who blogs about the ridiculousness of bringing up a mega-nerd small boy.
She has a profound addiction to tea, crosswords and awful puns. When not writing, she heads up a copywriting team at a global translation firm, where she generally tries to keep all the video-game writing to herself.
She studied English at Cambridge, where she became known quite quickly for her brand of twisty, dark yet entertaining drama. She later took the Creative Writing MA at UEA.
She has signed with Penguin Random House worldwide for the first three books in her crime series featuring DCI Jonah Sheens. She Lies in Wait will be released in January 2019.
